Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Interesting tidbits

-- Our best citing reference searching is Web of Science, but we do have other tools. Google Scholar's Cited By links are useful and sometimes give me a few unique references. Recently Google Scholar has added the ability to search within cited articles; I expect this will be very handy sometimes. I do find downloading citations from Google Scholar a bit clunky, although you can download one by one using Get it! buttons, if you have your Scholar Preferences set to include "Washington University in St Louis - Get it! @ WU." Get it! buttons are automatic if you are working on campus. [I think here are other tools that solve this problem also, such as Mendeley and others.] The University of Prince Edward Island has recently canceled their access to Web of Science and are hoping that alternatives may serve their scholars sufficiently. Don't worry; we are not considering this at WU currently. But I have listed a few of our alternatives here: Citation Tools, including MathSciNet. If you have other favorites, please let me know.

--Journals step up plagiarism policing; Cut-and-paste culture tackled by CrossCheck software FYI; this surprised me. "As publishers have expanded their testing of CrossCheck in the past few months, some have discovered staggering levels of plagiarism, from self-plagiarism, to copying of a few paragraphs or the wholesale copying of other articles. Taylor & Francis has been testing CrossCheck for 6 months on submissions to three of its science journals. In one, 21 of 216 submissions, or almost 10 percent, had to be rejected because they contained plagiarism."

-- "David Blackwell, a statistician and mathematician who wrote groundbreaking papers on probability and game theory and was the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, died July 8." David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91 [NYT July 17, 2010.]